RT:Another black man was killed a couple of
kilometers away from Ferguson, what is this going to do to the
situation?

Daniel Schechter: Of course it is going to make
things more tense. The government is doing its best trying to
chill this out, the Attorney General is headed to Ferguson and
the White House has said that President Obama has just gone back
from vacation and may go to Ferguson. This is a very big story,
it is emerging as a national, not just a local story, because it
is a symbol of a problem that has not been responded to, and in
fact seems to be getting worse as the federal government supplies
local police departments with military gear more suited for a
war. So we have the militarization of police, the criminalization
of the black community and the media seems to be incapable to
look at these things except to react to them. These things are
not new. Back in the 1960s when there were major riots and cities
burning down in America there was a commission that studied this
and found that we lived in two societies – one black and one
white. It also found that the American media had systematically
done a poor job representing conditions and grievances of black
Americans. Fast forward all these years later and this problem
still exists. I am sure that it is going to be a post mortem that
will reveal how unprepared the media was for all of this and how
it tends to be reactive in its coverage and how there are fewer
and fewer black journalists working in the media today.

RT:How would you describe the way the US
media covers events in Ferguson at the moment?

DS: For one thing a lot of the media people are
white. The do not know much of what is happening in the black
community, they tend to buy a lot of stereotypes, they do not
have good sources. So they get to the story and then react to it.
The police have set up a command post, a PR operation, trying to
control the information about what is going on. They try to spin
the story. On the other side, the community does not have the
same level of organization and leadership to challenge that, so
it takes a while for media people who are not from the community
to sort it out, to know who is who, to depict it. This has been a
problem consistently. When some white defendant commits a crime
there is a tendency to say "He is such a nice boy, we cannot
understand how this could have happened," whereas when a
young black man is in the same situation there is a lack of
sympathy, lack of compassion and understanding. That carries over
into how the media covers it. The incidents reported in
Huffington Post are pretty telling, but it is deeper than that.
It is not just the question that media are partial to whites and
against blacks; this is a story of how the poor also are
demonized and made invisible in our society.

This is much deeper than just racial in its outcome. It may look
racial, but it is also economic, and that also is not being
covered in any real way. You have a bad educational system, you
have a lack of employment opportunities, you have a lot of people
on public assistance barely getting by, and you have drugs in the
communities, because people's lives are miserable. There is a
lethal combination which often erupts into anger and
confrontations with the police and the police respond by treating
the community as if they are in Iraq and show up with
paramilitary SWAT teams, tanks and the alike. That just deepens
the divide that is what we are seeing here. We need a whole
different way of looking at these problems. We need a president
and leadership that can understand this conflict and try to
interpret it to the American people so that they can resolve it
or we are doomed to constantly relive it.

RT:Racism is a sensitive issue for the
American public. Is it something that is being openly
debated?

DS: First of all, everybody on the economic side
has agreed that we live in a country of intense economic
inequality, and that impacts the most on minorities, the people
who are in a sense permanently outside the economy, and this
includes black youth. If you have a situation when the
unemployment rate is 8-10 percent, it is triple for black young
people in America. So it is not surprising that these incidents
are triggered and that the police treat black communities and
black youth almost as a colonial government would consider
keeping the lid on in the societies they dominate. That is why
there has been parallel seen between Gaza and Ferguson, because
you have a kind of a colonial mentality. There have also been
reports that Israeli security companies help train the police in
Ferguson. There are a lot of parallels and problems that are much
deeper than a day-to-day story, and it seems that a lot of our
media does not seem capable of digging deeper and getting at the
context and the background of stories like this, and showcasing
this through the eyes of people who feel they are being
oppressed, not just through the eyes of the people who want peace
and order, but not necessarily justice.

There has been a pattern of police violence; it's not new or
unique, in the Ferguson and St. Louis area. We have seen
incidents like this almost every summer in the past umpteen
years, with the police force giving exaggerated abuse to
individuals. We have over two million people in jail in the US
and a large percentage of them are black and Spanish-speaking
Americans. There is a racial divide in our country and it shows
itself up in the law enforcement procedures and also in the way
media cover riots by minorities as well as the grievances of
black communities, and they get downplayed until somebody does
die.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.